They have worked with one of the academics who originally conducted the research, the University of Manchester’s Dr Xiaojun Zeng, to turn the study’s findings into a practical model for predicting market movements.

The £25million fund will be based in the Cayman Islands, and is set to launch in February 2011, according to The Next Web.

We will be very surprised if when it launches someone doesn’t start a campaign to get thousands of people to post tweets like ‘the stock market makes me sad :-(‘ or ‘OMG I am pessimistic about the manufacturing sector’ in an effort to precipitate a crash in the market.

(Alternatively, someone will just set up a huge network of spambots to flood Twitter with pre-determined sentiments in an attempt to game the market.)